12 Jan '12

“The really intriguing question here was whether depressive personalities are more likely to become top-level sportsman, or whether top-level sport is exceptionally good at creating depressives. An anecdotal documentary like this – principally devoted to the exemplary confession (designed to kill stigma and promote debate) – wasn’t really in a position to decisively answer that question. But it did suggest that at its highest levels sport is intrinsically damaging.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“It’s great that these hard, famous men are talking so openly and eloquently about something that no one would have admitted to a few years ago, a sign of changing attitudes. Flintoff himself is particularly good on the problem for high-profile sports people – of having this big, shiny public persona, the unflappable hero, when actually it’s not like that at all underneath.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“They’re comically at pains to stress just how blokey their cooking is. It’s not just that they boast of “a murderous sense of rivalry” at the beginning of the programme and bellow that “this is baking for boys”. Even the way they handle their ingredients is ostentatiously butch.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“They’re all mad – crazy women with crazy ideas and crazy names. You can see that Sharon is half-thinking that, but also half-thinking that maybe there’s something in what they say. She’s very good like that – at both taking seriously and taking the piss, all at the same time. She’s also taking the piss out of herself, as much as she is out of everyone else.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“The only mother I admired was Horgan, mainly for her tact, evident in self-depreciating asides such as “I really admire stay-at-home mums but they scare me too – I am afraid I would start drinking before noon.””
Andrew Billen, The Times

“Of course that is why a TV show about babies being born is so unfailingly successful. We’re all bothered even if we say we’re not. On some level the survival of our species matters to everyone. At the same time – and this is the real gift for the producers of a long-running TV series – no two babies ever show up in exactly the same way.”
Matt Baylis, The Express

“The conclusion of Gwyneth Hughes’s THe Mystery of Edwin Drood prompted a conclusion of my own: this is the best thing she has written, even given that she was given a fair wind by Charles Dickens.”
Andrew Billen